Dan Ackroyd doesn't sound as bad as I thought he would be. Justin Timberlake on the other hand... Ugh. It certainly looks like trash, but it looks better than I thought it would be, not by much though.

Oh man, I love Smokey Stover! That's one of the biggest arguments you can use that we should be giving newspaper comics artists enough room to tell a visual joke.

I'm sure John's seen it, but has anyone else around here had a look at a Smokey Stover-era comic strip called High Pressure Pete? It was well named, because every strip was frantic with visual gags, background details, puns, doodles, and huge action panels for the payoffs. It almost seemed like the cartoonist was being paid by the pen stroke, because there was so little white space in the strip! In a lot of ways it made Smokey Stover seem almost pedestrian; unfortunately it outlived its own idiom and became a Beetle Baily-esque single-gag strip late in life. There's some online that can be easily Googled, I highly recommend it.

Smokey Stover was always a fave. I'd spend hours drawing Holman's characters and poses. Didn't Clampett have one of the denizens of Wackyland say "FOO" in tribute to Stover? BTW: In the very early '60's, Chuck McCann & Paul Ashley did a puppet pilot of Smokey Stover. The puppets were awesome. The pilot, not so.

Seeing the "All-Negroes" comic gives me a question. Were there any outright racists who were great cartoonists and also if there were any defenders of civil rights? No matter what their work would still be great, but it is interesting to know the context of them.

ALL NEGRO COMICS?-geez, every so often i get reminded of what country i live in and its always a blow to the head! ALL NEGRO COMICS! why not all jew comics? or all paisan comics? its tiring.the catman presented here is not the dc character, this one is a hero and enjoying a revival over at dynamite press. how about all injun comics or all chink comics? shheesh!

This Smoky Stover cover sounds to be a wacky comic. Such more a inspiration to Milt Gross than Bob Clampett to the drawing style. Unfortunately, kids like better to read awful comics as Les Nombrils and Lou nowadays. And i hope no one of you else will read that. They are obvious and pretentious!

The wonderful thing about comic books during the aptly named Golden Age is that there were so many types and varieties. And even for a while after the Golden Age, into the Silver Age there were still many wonderful comic books for little boys and girls. Whatever you liked, you could generally find a great comic book that was about your interests or which contained them to some degree. So much imagination at work, and so much work to inspire the imaginations of the children who read those comics.

Not so today! Now there is only superhero crap! Alas. The world is all the poorer for the collapse of such a wonderful way of entertaining people.

"Not so today! Now there is only superhero crap! Alas. The world is all the poorer for the collapse of such a wonderful way of entertaining people."

I'm not gonna say that but i can understand. Today's comics follow trends than entertain peoples besides their final drawings is a lot of botch. I even buy a actual album contained some of the old Spirou's journal issues printed in 1970's today and they is a huge difference you don't see in today's issues. If peoples says goodbye to trends, superheroes and fake Anime, the Global comic world will have a better control. Same as animation too.

In one of the many Kurtzman/Wood MAD parodies of newspaper funnies (I think it was the one where all the long-running characters looked and acted how their real ages would be), their version of Henry was exactly the same as normal for three panels of little-boy visual gags before he explains, "I'm short, I'm bald, I do childish things and I have nothing of any relevance to say. I've been sixty years old all along!"

Ewg.... on the one hand I really want to be honest about how misguided the Not Dick Tracy Show was, like one of those Hanna-Barbera shows IN SPACE for no good reason. But on the other hand it's hard to put the boot into a cartoon show animated by just one man, especially if that man is Irv Spence.